In another interesting twist, because the list of names of who requested an absentee ballot are public records (as in all states), Miller is also charging that voters who requested absentee ballots are being contacted and asked about their vote.

I am not familiar enough with how the system works in Alaska, but I would not be surprised to learn that candidates are able to get a list of the names of registered voters whose ballots had been counted up to any particular day. This means that a campaign can target specifically those absentee voters who ballots were requested but not yet counted.

A colleague in the elections community sent along this observation, which is pertinent to any state that requires ballots only be postmarked, but not delivered by Election Day.

They are sitting in post offices or they’re in postal bags somewhere.

What if somebody, who already knows the Murkowski/Miller race is close, wanted to try and affect the outcome of the election and decided not to deliver a batch of ballots or discarded them?

Allowing timely postmarked ballots adds a security threat to the election when there are ballots out there floating around and elections officials don’t even know where they are. It also adds an extra difficult issue of what to do when the postmark is unreadable or is totally missing.

Check your next stack of mail. There are almost always some items in there missing a postmark.

The long count of votes in Australia is somewhat complicated by the Alternate Vote (AV) system used there.

Under AV (known as Instant Runoff Voting in the US), voters rank their preferences for all House of Representative candidates on their ballot. In the initial round of vote counts on election night only “ordinary votes” (cast at the polling place) are processed. The candidate with the least first preference votes is eliminated. A second round of counting then proceeds, with the eliminated candidate’s ballots being examined so that her supporters’ second preference votes may be transferred to the remaining candidates. These transfers continue until someone emerges with a majority.

But as pre-poll, postal, absentee, and provisional ballots are received after election day, the process is ran again. Since the final count can be contingent on the order that lower-ranking candidates are eliminated, everything is ran again from scratch – even in districts where a candidate had reached a majority in previous counts. In the vast majority of districts, the leading candidate on election night will win the seat. In a seat where the margin is razor thin, additional ballots and new preference transfers can cause things to bounce around a bit.

I spent the end of last week in Bellingham, WA (a wonderful city by the way–but keep it a secret!) and experienced the impact of a “slow count” firsthand. At least in Washington, the vote totals are updated daily, and for the press, this seems to provide an ongoing source of breathless coverage, as pundits (my friend Todd Donovan, a professor at Western Washington among them) speculate about the remaining ballots.

But much of our conversation as the week went on centered on the Australian election.

Nearly a week after polling day, as many as two million “special” ballots remain uncounted in the Australian federal election, and the balance of party control remains in question. While the parties continue to maneuver over potential governing coalitions, 14% of ballots cast have yet to be counted.

How did Australia get into this situation?

Observers of elections in the United States have lots of experience with slow counts.

In Alaska’s Senate primary battle between Joe Miller and incumbent Lisa Murkowski, Miller currently holds a 1,900 vote lead with 10,000 absentee votes left to be counted. According to the Alaska Secretary of State’s website, “early” and “in-person absentee” ballots are counted “from election night through up to 15 days after the election.” Unlike many other American jurisdictions, Alaska is a “postmark state”: so long as absentee ballots are mailed on or before Election Day, they will be counted up to the 10th day after the election. The slow count in Alaska is exacerbated by another provision in state law that early in person votes cannot start to be processed until 8 pm on Election Night.

So too in Washington State, voters only need postmark their ballot by Election Day. Election outcomes can play out over a period of several weeks while ballots trickle in to local offices and are processed and counted. The Gregoire/Rossi vote count in Washington’s very close Governor’s race in 2004 was a good example, but ongoing coverage of close races in the state continue to provide examples.

California regularly has slow counts for a different reason. The state allows absentee ballots to be returned to any precinct in the county on Election Day. (121,274 ballots were returned in LA County’s 2008 general election in this way.) Obviously, these ballots cannot be processed — signatures verified, envelopes opened, voter intent determined, and votes counted — until well after the polls close.

So where is Australia? It turns out that, in some ways, Australia has adopted the worst of all rules — at least in terms of determining an election outcome on a timely basis. Like many things in Australia, according to Todd, the country’s election law is a fusion of America and Britain, with a bit of Australasian flair.

An absent voter in Australia votes on Election Day, but outside of her home division.

An interstate voter casts a ballot outside his home state, but on Election Day. (These citizens can cast a ballot at an ‘interstate voting center’, but we’re not sure how these ballots are counted (or transmitted).)

A pre-poll vote is what Americans would understand as an early in-person vote. The ballot is cast in a voter’s home division, before Election Day, at an early voting center or any divisional office.[fn]Both pre-poll and postal voters need to satisfy one of a number of conditions, but these are relatively lax. For example, the conditions include “being 8km away from your polling place on Election Day,” or “traveling or unable to leave work.” A similar condition applies to voters in Virginia who work in DC and it has resulted in a notable spike in “excuse required” absentee voting in that state.[/fn]

A postal vote would be understood by Americans to be an absentee ballot. Like Alaska and Washington, a ballot need only be postmarked, not necessarily delivered, by Election Day.

In Australia, these non-precinct-place ballots are known as “declaration votes”. Unlike regular polling-place votes, the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) is expressly forbidden from even opening the envelopes of declaration votes until after Election Day.

So, like Alaska, California, and other jurisdictions before it, Australia now finds that the outcome of its election hinges on a slow and methodical count of absentee ballots. The diverse voting methods and lenient policies are doubtless a boon for many voters, but as with any aspect of electoral administration, there’s a cost to be borne. In this case, the price is a slow count.

This is not a problem, per se. Indeed, ensuring the widest possible franchise in a country with mandatory voting is a laudable goal. But it is something for election administrators and policymakers to pay heed to. Still, in Australia’s case, the Electoral Commission might look to the example of Oregon (a state with a great deal of practical experience in this area), and allow officials to open, verify, and process — though not actually count — ballots before Election Day.

Political scientist Chuck Bullock notes that a longer, early voting period in Georgia did not result in an increase in turnout (full story is in the Moultrie Observer).

Chuck’s quote:

It seems logical if you extend the voting time you increase voting,” he said. “It turns out it doesn’t work that way. The early research suggested it did bump up participation. All the later research discounts that. More convenience and increasing the time didn’t increase the vote.”

A story in The Plain Dealer notes that voting errors increase as the use of vote by mail increases.

What’s interesting about this story is that it focuses on a basic mechanical “mistake,” meaning that voters failed to include a proper form of identification or did not use the secrecy envelope. The much more common error results from voters mis-marking the ballot (over and undervotes). Residual vote studies have long shown higher rates of voter errors whenever a central count system is used, where voters are not given real-time feedback on the accuracy of their use of the ballot.

A delay in counting the “deluge” of mail in ballots in last Tuesday’s California primary has sparked calls for County Clerk Barbara Dunmore’s resignation. Delays in counting ballots in California has been recognized for a long time. One of the main causes is that California allows citizens to drop off their absentee ballots “in person” on election day at any local precinct. Administratively, this means that, at the end of the day, all of these ballots need to be transported to the central counting location, validated, opened, and processed.

CA is also a voter-intent state, which only further slows the processing of vote by mail ballots, where citizens are more prone to make stray marks and errors that are not flagged by optical scanning readers.

I can’t imagine how this could be done in any large county by the next morning, as some state legislators apparently want. There is a clear tension between a speedy final count and a very generous, vote anywhere and in any way system like currently exists in many California counties.

This story out of Passaic County is not another story about absentee ballots and vote fraud. But it is a cautionary tale about how important ballot handling procedures can be when new voting systems are implemented.

The basic summary is this: a county clerk found 49 uncounted mail in ballots while “handling” the ballots after the election. Even though the envelopes had been time-stamped indicating that they had arrived on time, the clerk chose not to count them because the election results had already been announced. A judge overturned this decision, and once counted, a different winner was declared.

What I found most curious, and disturbing, about the story is this quote:

Ken Hirrman, an office administrator with the Passaic County Board of Elections, said he discovered the 49 ballots Tuesday while handling the mail-in ballots.

Hirmann said he noticed the uncounted ballots because they were enclosed in thicker envelopes, indicating that they had not been opened and counted.

I have witnessed a lot of vote by mail and absentee balloting systems and have interviewed dozens of election officials about their administrative procedures. I can’t imagine putting in place a system whereby the situation above could possibly occur. This means that the ballot, still inside the secrecy sleeve, and then still inside the stamped envelope, somehow made it through the slicing process, the signature verification process, the separation of the outside envelope from the inner ballot process, and finally the tallying process, and no one noticed that there were still intact envelopes in the batch?

New Jersey has only recently gone to no-excuse absentee and permanent absentee. I hope they have also paid attention to some of the long established ballot handling procedures put in place in CA, OR, WA, IA, and many other states.

The Early Voting Information Center

We are a non-partisan academic research center based at Reed College in Portland, Oregon.

Professor Paul Gronke and his team conduct research on early voting and election reform, predominantly in the United States. In addition to our scholarly research, we have worked on projects with the Pew Center on the States, the Federal Election Assistance Commission, the Center for American Progress and a number of state and local elections offices.

The Early Voting Information Center is proud to have co-hosted the inaugural Election Sciences, Reform, and Administration Conference in July of 2017. More information can be found on the conference website.

Professor Gronke's academic credentials--including his curriculum vita, courses taught, and other research papers--can be found at his personal Reed web page.